WordsAmok!

WordsAmok! began as a fairly simple game that blended elements of Scrabble and Tetris. Seven letters would fall slowly from the ceiling – your goal was to make the longest word you could from the letters before they hit the ground or the piles of rubble (i.e. unused letters from previous rounds) below. Long words would clear away rubble, and there were special characters that would clear away rubble in specific ways (e.g. a pink “e” would clear away all the “e”s in the rubble if you used it in a word; a green letter would shear off the top of the highest rubble column).

Building this game sparked a desire to make more word games. There are a lot out there, but I feel like there’s plenty of room to make stuff that’s pretty different.

So I made WordsAmok 2, which I find much more addictive. WordsAmok 2 is based loosely on the gameplay of Boggle – you get one set of tiles and you have to make as many words as you can from adjacent tiles in the allotted time. The big difference with WordsAmok 2 is that the tiles are laid out in 3 concentric circles, rather than a grid, and each time you make a word, the circles rotate independently of one another, one position in a random direction, so the adjacent tiles shift every turn.

The other big difference is that words are scored both on their length and on the relative rarity of the word. I scoured multiple wordlists from the internet and wrote a program to sort them in order of how frequently the word appears in Google Books’ English Fiction corpus over the past couple of decades – the rarer the word, the higher the value, so a really odd 3-letter word is worth as much as a routine 6-letter word. It’s not perfect, but it adds a level of intrigue to the game.

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About This Site

Jared Friedman is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and commercial tee-shirt printer based in New York City. His work explores themes of connection and familiarity in a rapidly technologizing world.

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134 Tehama St.Brooklyn, NY 11218

917 754 2829friedman dot jared at gmail dot com

About Me

I’m a mutidisciplinary artist, musician and screen printer based in Brooklyn, NY. My work deals largely with the connections between people, places and technologies in an increasingly processed world. Also word games!